Sun 30 Sep 2007
Big Road Blues Show 9/30/07: Atlanta Strut – Blind Willie McTell & The Atlanta Blues
Posted by Jeff under East Coast Blues, Playlists
[5] Comments
| ARTIST | SONG | ALBUM |
|---|---|---|
| Blind Willie McTell | Ticket Agent Blues | The Classic Years 1927-1940 |
| Blind Willie McTell | Statesboro Blues | The Classic Years 1927-1940 |
| Blind Willie McTell | Mama, 'Taint Long Fo' Day | The Classic Years 1927-1940 |
| Curley Weaver | No No Blues | Atlanta Blues |
| Curley Weaver | You Was Born To Die | Atlanta Blues |
| Curley Weaver | Wild Cat Kitten | Atlanta Blues |
| Curley Weaver | Some Rainey Day | Atlanta Blues |
| Blind Willie McTell | Love Changing Blues | The Classic Years 1927-1940 |
| Blind Willie McTell | Scarey Day Blues | The Classic Years 1927-1940 |
| Blind Willie McTell | Atlanta Strut | The Classic Years 1927-1940 |
| Blind Willie McTell | Lord, Send Me An Angel | The Classic Years 1927-1940 |
| Buddy Moss | Someday Baby | Buddy Moss Vol 2 1933 - 1934 |
| Buddy Moss | Jealous Hearted Man | Buddy Moss Vol 1 1933 |
| Buddy Moss | Going To Your Funeral ... | Buddy Moss Vol 3 1935 - 1941 |
| Buddy Moss | Joy Rag | Buddy Moss Vol 3 1935 - 1941 |
| Blind Willie McTell | Monologues On The History... | The Classic Years 1927-1940 |
| Blind Willie McTell | Blues Around Midnight | Atlanta Twelve String |
| Blind Willie McTell | Little Delia | Atlanta Twelve String |
| Blind Willie McTell | Kill It Kid | Atlanta Twelve String |
| Peg Leg Howell | Broke & Hungry Blues | Atlanta Blues |
| H. Williams & E. Anthony | Georgia Crawl | Atlanta Blues |
| Macon Ed & Tampa Joe | Everything's Coming My Way | Atlanta Blues |
| Ruth Willis | Man Of My Own | Georgia Blues 1928 - 1933 |
| Fred McMullen | DeKalb Chain Gang | Georgia Blues 1928 - 1933 |
| Blind Willie McTell | Talkin' to You, Mama | McTell & Weaver - The Post-War Years |
| Blind Willie McTell | East St. Louis | McTell & Weaver - The Post-War Years |
| Blind Willie McTell | Good Little Thing | McTell & Weaver - The Post-War Years |
| Barbecue Bob | Barbecue Blues | Barbecue Bob Vol 1 1927 - 1928 |
| Barbecue Bob | Goin' Up the Country | Barbecue Bob Vol 1 1927 - 1928 |
| Barbecue Bob | It Won't be Long Now, Part 1 | Barbecue Bob Vol 1 1927 - 1928 |
| Blind Willie McTell | A Married Man's A Fool | Last Session |

Show Notes:
I recently finished Michael Gray’s excellent “Hand Me My Travelin’ Shoes – In Search of Blind Willie McTell” which is the inspiration for today’s show. In addition to focusing on Blind Willie we play the music of his fellow Atlanta bluesmen, just about all who were inspired by McTell and several who played with him. Like Memphis, Atlanta was a staging post for musicians on their way to all points. It’s not surprising then that the first country blues musician, Ed Andrews, was recorded there in 1924. The company that recorded him, Okeh, was one of many to send their engineers to Southern cities to record local talent. Companies like Victor, Columbia, Vocalion and Brunswick made at least yearly visits until the depression.
McTell was born in Thomson, Georgia, near Augusta, and raised near Statesboro. He played a standard six-string acoustic until the mid-’20s, and never entirely abandoned the instrument, but from the beginning of his recording career, he used a 12-string acoustic in the studio almost exclusively. He was A major figure with a local following in Atlanta from the 1920s onward, he recorded dozens of sides throughout the 1930s under a multitude of names — all the better to juggle “exclusive” relationships with many different record labels at once — including Blind Willie, Blind Sammie, Hot Shot Willie, and Georgia Bill, as a backup musician to Ruth Mary Willis. Willie’s recording career began in late 1927 with two sessions for Victor records, eight sides including “Statesboro Blues.”
He recorded prolifically through the 1930′s a did a session for the Library of Congress in 1940 under the supervision of John Lomax. The newly founded Atlantic Records — which was more noted for its recordings of jazz and R&B — took an interest in Willie and cut 15 songs with him in Atlanta during 1949. The one single released from these sessions, however, didn’t sell, and most of those recordings remained unheard for more than 20 years after they were made. McTell cut his final sides for record store owner Ed Rhodes in 1956, who had begun taping local bluesmen at his shop in Atlanta in the hope of releasing some of it. These turned out to be the only tapes he saved, out of all he’d recorded.
A younger contemporary of Blind Willie McTell and Curley Weaver, Eugene “Buddy” Moss was part of a near-legendary coterie of Atlanta bluesmen, and one of the few of his era lucky enough to work into the blues revival of the 1960s and ’70s. By the time he arrived in Atlanta, he was good enough to be noticed by Curley Weaver and Robert “Barbecue Bob” Hicks, who began working with the younger Moss. It was Weaver and Bob that got him his first recording date, at the age of 16, as a member of their group the Georgia Cotton Pickers, on December 7, 1930. In January of 1933, however, he made his debut as a recording artist in his own right for the American Record Company. He frequently played with Barbecue Bob, and after Bob died of pneumonia on October 21, 1931, he found a new partner and associate in Blind Willie McTell, performing with the Atlanta blues legend as local parties in the Atlanta area. A jail term curtailed his career from 1935-1941. Moss made some further recordings before WW II interfered. Moss continued performing in the area around Richmond, Virginia and Durham, North Carolina during the mid-’40s, and with Curley Weaver in Atlanta during the early 1950s, but music was no longer his profession or his living.
One of the first recorded products of the Atlanta blues community of the pre-war era, Peg Leg Howell bridged the gap between the early country-blues sound and the 12-bar stylings to follow. He signed to Columbia in 1926. Howell recorded prolifically up until 1929; he recorded solo and with his street group, the Gang (guitarist Henry Williams and fiddler Eddie Anthony). Williams was imprisoned not long after, and following Anthony’s 1934 death, Howell gradually disappeared from the area blues circuit. He spent the next several decades clouded in obscurity, with diabetes claiming his other leg in 1952. Howell was 75 when the Testament label sought him out in 1963 to record his first new material in over 40 years; he died in Atlanta on August 11, 1966.
Eddie Anthony and Henry Williams cut one 78 in 1930. In addition Anthony recorded as Macon Ed with the mysterious Tampa Joe. They cut eight sides in 1930.
Little is known about Fred McMullen. He cut 8 issued sides in 1933 for ARC label. Was part of the group called the Georgia Browns with Buddy Moss and Curley Weaver who cut 10 sides in 1933.
Barbecue Bob was the name given by Columbia Records talent scout Don Hornsby to Atlanta blues singer Robert Hicks. Hicks is widely credited as being the singer who more than any helped to popularize Atlanta blues in its formative period. Born to a family of sharecroppers in Walnut Grove, GA, Robert Hicks and his brother, Charley “Lincoln” Hicks relocated with them to Newton County. There the Hicks brothers came in contact with Savannah “Dip” Weaver and her son, Curley Weaver. With the Weavers, the Hicks boys learned to play guitar and sing. Robert Hicks was the first of this group to “break out”; Hicks’ first Columbia record, “Barbecue Blues,” recorded in Atlanta on March 25, 1927 and was a big hit. Over the next three years he made 62 sides for Columbia. Hicks died in 1931 of pneumonia. He was only 29.




Also worth noting are some more recent cuts, relativity speaking, including Son Seals’ swinging “Four Full Seasons of Love” from 1976′s “Midnight Son”, my favorite album by him. Then there’s Luther Johnson heard on the 1966 cut “Creepin’ Snake.” This come from an interesting album on Victoria Spivey’s 

Muddy Waters was a larger then life figure who became a star in the late 1940′s and remained a huge presence on the blues landscape until his death in 1983. When Muddy arrived in Chicago from the Delta in 1943 he was just another struggling musician trying to establish himself. Pete Welding described his early years: “After several years of playing to slowly increasing audiences, first at houseparties and later in small taverns dotted throughout Chicago’s huge, sprawling South and West Side black-belt slums, he had begun to record.” In this feature we start by going back to the early years, not only playing Muddy’s early recordings but spotlighting the many recordings that find Muddy backing his friends and contemporaries. The bulk of Muddy’s session work spans from 1946 to the early 1950′s becoming much less frequent as his star rose. Still even in later years Muddy was always willing to back friends and band mates like Otis Spann, Little Walter, Luther Johnson and others.
In the early years he backed some of the city’s finest including Sunnyland Slim, Baby Face Leroy, Jimmy Rogers and Junior Well. Muddy made his first sides under his own name for Columbia as well as backing obscure artists like James “Beale Street” Clark and Homer Harris (the bulk of these sides remained unissued for decades). We begin the show by playing some of these records before moving on to his better known records for Aristocrat (which later became Chess).
Otis Spann helmed the piano chair in Muddy’s band for over fifteen years and Muddy returned the favor backing Spann on the albums “The Blues Never Die!” (as Muddy Rivers), “The Bottom of the Blues” and “The Blues Is Where It’s At.” He also backed Luther Johnson on two late 1960′s records, pops up with his band on “The Bluesmen of the Muddy Waters Chicago Blues Band” (as Main Stream) on the Spivey label and did some all-star group recordings with Howlin’Wolf, Bo Diddley and others on “The Super Super Blues Band” and “Super Blues.”
Johnson was back in the studio in 1934 with old friends Henry Brown and Ike Rogers on board. Four songs were cut at three sessions including “Those Black Man Blues” and remake of 1929′s “Black Men Blues” which was a modest hit. Perhaps she was running out of inspiration as she also cut a variation of Joe Pullum’s huge hit “Black Gal What makes Your Head So Hard?” which Pullum cut just five months prior. Her version, “Black Gal Blues”, is quite good as she emulates Pullum’s delivery which makes the song sound different than anything else she recorded and also fiddles with the lyrics giving it her own personal stamp. Perhaps the standout is the gorgeous “Peepin’ At The Risin’ Sun” featuring terrific piano from the ever reliable Henry Brown who also gets plenty of room to stretch out on the fine “Deceitful Woman Blues.”
More piano-based and jazz-influenced than anything else, West Coast Blues is really California blues even if most of the main practitioners actually hailed from Texas. There was no pre-war blues activity in California but the the post-war blues era was booming. With the shipyards and aircraft factories desperate for labor during the war years, blacks flocked to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland and small towns like Richmond, Fresno, Stockton and Modesto. The non-white population exploded from 80, 000 in 1930 to 462,000 by 1950. Numerous small independent labels popped up in the 40′s to cater to this new market including Aladdin, Swingtime, Modern, Speciality and many smaller outfits who specialized in R&B and blues and would take more chances than the more established labels.
Amos Milburn signed with Aladdin in 1946 and had the first of19 Top Ten R&B smashes with 1948′ storming “Chicken Shack Boogie.” In addition to rocking boogies he he could croon in the best Charles Brown manner. In the same mold was Little Willie Littlefield who made his debut in 1948 racking up major R&B hits with “It’s Midnight” and “Farewell.” Floyd Dixon also debuted in 1948 earning many comparisons to his mentor Charles Brown although eventually developing a grittier, more soulful sound than Brown. Dixon hit locally with 1949′s “Dallas Blues.” Aladdin Records acquired Dixon’s contract with Modern in late 1950, immediately pairing him with Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers for “Telephone Blues,” his first nationwide hit. Roy Hawkins too made his debut in 1948 although less well remembered than his contemporaries. Hawkins had two major R&B hits: 1950′s “Why Do Things Happen to Me” and “The Thrill Is Gone” the following year.



